Need More Juice for Your AA Battery? Shake, Shake, Shake!

If you're off grid but still needing to use AA-style batteries, wouldn't it be great to be able to add more juice just by shaking them up a bit? That's what the Mint Energy Rechargeable Battery concept would allow us to do...just use a little "shakenergy."Essentially, the idea takes the recharging component of a hand-crank battery charger and puts it inside the actual battery. Shaking it charges it up. It'd be a back-up solution, with the battery still able to be charged with a non-shaky charger.

As with all of these new battery concepts we have to ask two big questions: 1) How is the battery being easily recyclable and non-toxic incorporated into the design? and 2) Why not spend energy designing products that don't need batteries at all, instead of designing batteries that will eventually be part of a waste stream?

Still, it's a kinda cool idea for taking the bulky crank charger out of the picture altogether, and makes the battery part of the fun of using toys and devices. But for now, choose the greenest rechargeable batteries that you can.